Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:53:56 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net> Cc: David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stallman now claims authorship of Linux Message-ID: <20010419185356.M88142@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20010419075750.P5664-100000@blues.jpj.net>; from trevor@jpj.net on Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 08:15:35AM -0400 References: <NCBBLIEPOCNJOAEKBEAKIEEFOHAA.davids@webmaster.com> <20010419075750.P5664-100000@blues.jpj.net>
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Trevor Johnson said on Apr 19, 2001 at 08:15:35: > > Except that usually the "original author" can't do that, because he's not > > the *sole* author. The GPL does *not* reserve to the original author the > > right to license derived works under alternate terms. It reserves that right > > solely to the FSF. > > Just releasing something under the GPL doesn't give the FSF any say over > what happens to it. That only happens if the author--or > authors--transfers the copyright to the FSF (something they do encourage). Absolutely. > I've seen lots of projects that have only one author, an observation that > is weakly supported by the survey at > http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/develpro.html (see Figure 5 and the text after > it). If there are several, of course it's less convenient for you. > Sometimes gift horses aren't all we'd wish. All the anti-GPL crusaders are people who want free software but don't want to abide by the original author's terms. If *you* want their software, you abide by *their* conditions. The writers of gcc did not intend that its distribution be restricted, and they chose a license with that point of view. No matter how brilliant your improvement to gcc, you have no right to take their work and close it up just because you want to sell your contribution restrictively. If you want closed source, write it all yourself. I don't think Brett and his ilk would think of demanding to do what they like with Borland's or Sun's software even if it's totally closed, but apparently GPL is fair game. There are at least two projects -- ghostscript and qt -- whose authors (Peter Deutsch and Troll Tech, respectively) were uneasy about the GPL because it does not *sufficiently* restrict commercial use. They wanted to sell commercial versions to people who wanted, while keeping it free for free software people, but were worried about loopholes in the GPL. So both wrote their own licenses. Deutsch chose to release old versions under the GPL, while Troll Tech eventually decided to dual-license their current versions because they wanted the community's goodwill. I simply can't imagine them, or anyone else who wanted to make money, choosing the BSD license. Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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